Are Paytables Honest

[monic]

I play a lot of video poker and I pay attention to the paytables and follow the strategy.  I also keep records of results.  After a lot of research, I have concluded that the paytables may not tell the whole story.  I don't believe that the machines use a fair random number generator or the software used doesn't generate the results expected for a fair machine... so the house advantage is a lot higher than the paytables would indicate.
 
Rather than go into a lot of statistics and detail, I think I can prove my point by having you conduct a little experiment at your favorite casino and on your favorite video poker machine.
 
Pay attention to the times when you hold three cards of a royal flush.  Keep track of the number of times you get the 4th card.  It should not happen very often and yet, on some machines, the 4th card comes up as often as 20% of the time.  This should not be the case but I believe that the software is programmed to put up the 4th card to entice you to keep on playing.  Hence, the software has been jiggered.
 
Another situation to observe occurs with deuces wild.  Depending on the paytable, the correct strategy is to hold two pair.  Pay attention to the number of times you fill the two pair for a full house.  Compare this to what happens at several casinos.  There is a bank of machines in Las Vegas that fills almost 25% of the time (too high) and a bank of machines on a riverboat in Indiana that almost never fills (too low).  Yet the paytables on the machines are identical and presumably, the random number generators and software should provide a fair game.
 
These two examples are not the result of too small a sample.  I have played over a million hands on these machines and have kept track of the statistics.  The statistics do not even come close to what the paytables would suggest.
 
The reason I am raising this subject is that we have all been led to believe that if we play perfect strategy, over a long period of time, we can break even or maybe win a little (with the right paytable of course).  I no longer believe this.
 
I still play, and I still win, but not to the degree that the paytables would suggest.

[birdgilliam]

I have found the same thing in Jack or better in the Cacinos in Tunica. Thank you for bring this subject up
Tom

[bigboy]

Pay attention to the times when you hold three cards of a royal flush.  Keep track of the number of times you get the 4th card.  It should not happen very often and yet, on some machines, the 4th card comes up as often as 20% of the time.  This should not be the case but I believe that the software is programmed to put up the 4th card to entice you to keep on playing.  Hence, the software has been jiggered.
 
These two examples are not the result of too small a sample.  I have played over a million hands on these machines and have kept track of the statistics.  The statistics do not even come close to what the paytables would suggest.
 
The reason I am raising this subject is that we have all been led to believe that if we play perfect strategy, over a long period of time, we can break even or maybe win a little (with the right paytable of course).  I no longer believe this.
 
I still play, and I still win, but not to the degree that the paytables would suggest.
 
 
Statistically speaking, i should have been dealt at least 2 royals playing on practice software(non-casino play).  My total still stands at 0. I guess my practice software must be rigged also.

[monic]

I don't think you can say that for sure if you are talking about 2 Royal Flushes.  You need to play a longer time and you may hit several Royals in a row.  I once hit three Royal's and 5 sets of 4 deuces in 18,000 hands.  However, then I hit a cold streak that more than made up for this string of exceptional luck.
 
I have played a million hands at the Riverboat and more than a million in Las Vegas.  My statistics are for more frequently occuring events so I am pretty sure that what I have observed is not what you would expect with a random number generator programmed correctly.  In case you wonder how I know how many hands I have played, the comp points make it easy to keep track of the money circulated.

[monic]

One additional comment about my post.  I regularly play Bob Dancer's Video Poker on my laptop.  The random number generator and the software programming seems to be truly random.  The actual results seems to be close to what is expected.  You do need to play a lot of games to verify this, but after about 100,000 hands, I do not find the "fairness" issue that I have found at the casinos.

[shadowman]

I play a lot of video poker and I pay attention to the paytables and follow the strategy.  I also keep records of results.  After a lot of research, I have concluded that the paytables may not tell the whole story.  I don't believe that the machines use a fair random number generator or the software used doesn't generate the results expected for a fair machine... so the house advantage is a lot higher than the paytables would indicate.
 
Rather than go into a lot of statistics and detail, I think I can prove my point by having you conduct a little experiment at your favorite casino and on your favorite video poker machine.
 
This should be interesting. It is pretty much impossible for anyone to conduct a reasonable experiment given the fact that ALL situations are possible. Some are just more probable than others.
 
Pay attention to the times when you hold three cards of a royal flush.  Keep track of the number of times you get the 4th card.  It should not happen very often and yet, on some machines, the 4th card comes up as often as 20% of the time.  This should not be the case but I believe that the software is programmed to put up the 4th card to entice you to keep on playing.  Hence, the software has been jiggered.
 
Just how often do you think you should get one card?????  You should see the 4th card 2/47 + 2/47 times. That's 4/47 or around 8% of the time.
 
You stated "some machines" which means you appear to be reducing the sample size to prove to yourself that something is amiss. You may have convinced yourself, but this kind of logic won't convince a skeptical observer. With true random events you WILL see what appears to be strangeness. I've seen these same short term variations and they eventually disappear with more play. Of course, I have around 8-9 million hands under my belt. I've often seen streaks where I'm hitting the 4th card quite often, eventually I'll have another streak where I almost never see the 4th card. You didn't mention the rate of occurance over ALL the hands you've played. Could it be close to 8%?
 
I realize it's difficult for people to understand the craziness of true randomness. For example, last year I had a stretch of 208 straight 4 card draws to a RF with no hits. You'd think a streak that long would never occur again to the same player ... wrong, this year I went 200 tries without a hit. Is this unlikely? Sure, but not as unusual as one would think. In addition, even with these streaks I managed to make money through "good" streaks of other hands. In the last couple of weeks I've probably hit 4 aces better than once every 1000 hands. Would this kind of streak convince you the machine are rigged in the player's favor?
 
It's easy to think that events with a probablility of .1% are never going to happen. However, the fact is, they will happen to one out of every thousand players, or ONE player who completes 1000 cycles of those events.
 
  Another situation to observe occurs with deuces wild.  Depending on the paytable, the correct strategy is to hold two pair.  Pay attention to the number of times you fill the two pair for a full house.  Compare this to what happens at several casinos.  There is a bank of machines in Las Vegas that fills almost 25% of the time (too high) and a bank of machines on a riverboat in Indiana that almost never fills (too low).  Yet the paytables on the machines are identical and presumably, the random number generators and software should provide a fair game.
 
Nothing you've said convinces me your seeing anything but random variations. Once you start spreading a million hands over several casinos and many different games you increase the probability of short term fluctuations.
 
These two examples are not the result of too small a sample.  I have played over a million hands on these machines and have kept track of the statistics.  The statistics do not even come close to what the paytables would suggest.
 
The reason I am raising this subject is that we have all been led to believe that if we play perfect strategy, over a long period of time, we can break even or maybe win a little (with the right paytable of course).  I no longer believe this.
 
I still play, and I still win, but not to the degree that the paytables would suggest.
 
A million hands played is quite a bit, but the subsets of those where you see good hits at certain times and poor hits at other times are simply randomness at it's best (worst?). Until you have sufficient hands at both casinos where you're playing deuces you will be unable to reach any reasonable conclusions. BTW, I have experienced many of the same situations you have decscribed. In some cases the probabilities I have experienced are less than 1 in 10000. This is not proof of anything other than random events will occur ... randomly.
 
Finally, you stated that you do win. I think this is evidence that your efforts of finding good paytables and playing well have paid off. I'll admit there are times I get frustrated over long term "negative" random fluctuations.  However, they have always disappeared given enough time and enough hands. I usually feel a little stupid over the whining I always do whenever these streaks occur.  A couple of years ago I had one RF over a two month period with 200-300K hands. About a month later I hit 8 RFs in a two week stretch.
 
VP is a game where you will see more/longer negative streaks than positive ones. It's simply part of the game where a few good hands provide the difference between winning and losing. The losing streaks will seem too long and winning streaks too short.
 
I'm not sure if I've changed your mind. I can provide you lots more examples of seemingly impossible bad streaks (and good streaks) that I've experienced. The only advice I can give you is to dig a little deeper in your understanding of randomness and probabilities associated with it. Better understanding doesn't make the bad streaks any more fun, but is does reduce the frustration a wee bit.

[monic]

You haven't convinced me yet.  The reason that I cited the two examples was because the frequency of occurence is high enough to observe and check the results.  The best example is filling two pairs in Deuces Wild.  At the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas on ONE machine (the same one every day for more than 6 hours in a stretch) the fill rate was near 25%.  At Belterra in Indiana on one machine under similar circumstances, the fill rate was less than 3%.  This isn't guesswork, this is actual record the frequency on paper and compare it to the statistical probability.
 
I didn't keep track of every other combination that came up so it is possible that both machines make up for these fill differences is some other way (maybe one fills straights more often than the other) but you will never convince me that the programming of these two machines is similar with respect to this one event.
 
Also regarding the 4th card of a Royal does occur with much greater frequency than 8% on Spin Poker at Grand Victoria in Indiana.  The frequency is more than double that over long periods of time.  Again, the number of times 3 cards of a Royal show up is often enough to be able to verify this event using a significant sample size.  Remember, I am not whining about the number of Royal Flushes I get, just commenting on two observable events that should occur often enough to judge whether the paytables and software programming are honest.
 
I too have had incredible hot streaks of 3 Royals in 3 six hour sessions and even more incredible cold streaks.  I understand that you have to play millions of hands for these statistics to even out.  But the two examples I cited are not rare events so it is easier to make observations.

[faygo]

Random is as Random does. I suggest, if possible Monic that you should observe others playing the same machines over a long period of time , then compare their results to yours. One person on one machine doesn't get statiscally close to anything. If I thought for a moment there was secondary programming of VP, you wouldn't find me near them.

[shadowman]

I think the problem is related to what you consider "rare events" and how long various streaks can occur. There is nothing in randomness that prevents extremely long streaks of just about anything you can think about. The probabilities may be low but as I said before, this is not PROOF that something is not random. Have you checked with other people playing the same machines to see if they noticed the same situations?
 
I once had a situation at a casino where I was hitting straights holding 2,3,4,5 by drawing the ace about 1/2 to 1/3 of the time instead of the 1/12 that should occur with that card. This lasted around 6 months of consistent play (maybe a quarter million hands). Then, all of a sudden, it went away. I haven't seen anything like it before or since. It's this kind of experience that demonstrates that unlikely sequences can occur for long periods of time.
 
I'd suggest starting over your counts and see if you have the same strangeness over the next 100K hands or so. It's always possible to go back in history and see strange patterns. However, to have one occur in the future when you're looking for it would be extremely questionable.
 
Finally, I have run into a situation where a slot machine did not behave as it should when a new casino opened. It was clearly not random because everyone at the bank of machines was winning. This was a 3 column red, white and blue slot machine and 3 bars kept coming up over and over again. In addition, the top line never came up on any machine. The net result was slow increases in credits. My wife and I took $3300 out of the machines over a two day period before they were shut down. Could this same kind of malfunction carry over into VP machines. Who knows.

[Eduardo]

If you win, but not to the degree the paytables suggest, what paytables are you playing and how much are you winning? It sounds like if these frequent events were ripping you off, you wouldn't stand a chance at winning since paytables only give you a small edge to begin with?